Food as a Matter of Global Governance.

• Author: Fakhri, Michael
• Position: Response to article by Anne Orford in this issue, p. 1

1. THE DE SCHUTTER-LAMY DEBATES II. GLOBAL GOVERNANCE III. WHAT ORFORD'S PERSPECTIVE BRINGS TO THE DE SCHUTTER--LAMY DEBATE IV. THE LIMITS OF GLOBAL GOVERNANCE V. PUSHING TRADE LAW TOWARDS QUESTIONS OF GROWING AND EATING I. THE DE SCHUTTER-LAMY DEBATES

   One of the most important questions today is whether the World Trade Organization (WTO) works against or supports food security. Olivier De Schutter, during his tenure as the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, engaged in this question with the then-Director-General of the WTO, Pascal Lamy. They debated each other in very frank terms in 20091 and 2011. (2)

   De Schutter framed hunger as an issue that brings small farmers into alliance with the landless, urban poor, and those whose livelihood and welfare depend on fishing and hunting. To him, the key problem was that food prices are too high for consumers and yet too low for small farmers to make a living. Lamy also took the issue of food security, poverty, and hunger very seriously. But he framed the issue as a tension mostly between urban poor consumers versus rural farmers. The question to Lamy was how to ensure existing free trade law and policies continued to operate in order to ensure that food is produced and distributed efficiently; to him, this would reduce food prices and improve poor and hungry people's access to food. The debate has influenced ongoing discussions amongst academics, (3) civil society organizations, (4) and agriculturalists. (5)

   De Schutter and Lamy agreed that their debate was not only about food security and trade rules as such, but also about the WTO's role as a global governance institution. (6) Thus, their debate exemplified twenty years of disagreements over the function and purpose of the WTO. (7) De Schutter employed constitutional terms--he understood the right to food as a value that competes with free trade; he argued that the right to food is higher on the global hierarchy of values and thus trade law must comply with the right to food. Lamy characterized the WTO as an economic institution whose principal purpose is to enforce principles of free trade and defend a presumed boundary between state and market (using the language of "trade distortion").

   Both De Schutter and Lamy agreed that the WTO constrains state power. De Schutter argued that WTO rules are too rigid and ambiguous. Trade law, therefore, restrained states' ability (especially poorer ones) from designing and deploying new domestic policies aimed at ensuring food security. Lamy, on the other hand, argued that the boon of trade law was that it disciplined states against intervening into the market. But he interpreted trade law to be flexible enough to grant states the necessary space to devise food security policies. Instead of a hierarchy of values, Lamy's legal thinking was in terms of norms and exceptions. Free trade is the necessary ideal. Any food security policies that do not adhere to free trade norms, such as stockpiling, may be carved out within the terms of WTO law as temporary exceptions.

   In this short comment, I do not engage with the substance of this debate. Rather, I examine how the debate was argued. As such, I first explore what global governance means. I then insert Anne Orford's study of food security and international trade into the De Schutter and Lamy debate. Orford's work highlights how a broad, historical global governance perspective may augment the study of food security. I conclude by outlining the limits of a global governance perspective and briefly consider how trade law might also be understood in terms of growing and eating, and making and exchanging.

2. GLOBAL GOVERNANCE

   Scholars, policy researchers, and policy makers first coined the term "global governance" in the early 1990s. In the beginning, it was mostly developed by international relations scholars in the United States. The term now has its own life and multiple meanings in a number of disciplines. "Global governance" arose from an appreciation that states were not the only entities that determined how the world was organized and governed. In fact, many at the time assumed that states' ability to govern on any scale was waning (or argued that it should be restricted). Global governance built upon an image of a world that was deeply interconnected, where the actions in one particular part of the world affected other distant parts. It was also an image that did not have clear nodes of authority. As such, global governance was developed as a way to examine how decisions and power were diffuse and dispersed across a plethora of institutions.

   In sum, a global governance perspective looks for how power is exercised through a range of mechanisms that do not fall within any well-defined hierarchies of command. (8) Rosenau provides a broad and dynamic definition of the concept. To him, a global governance perspective is a way to examine the "systems of rule at all levels of human activity--from the family to the international organization--in which the pursuit of the goals through the exercise of control has transnational repercussions." (9)

   The perennial debate in global governance has been over this perspective's purview. In other words, how do we determine or identify what counts as a global governance mechanism? (10) Regardless, a global governance perspective often focuses on institutions and institutional actors. This is because institutions are historical repositories of norms, rules, and conventions. They provide the intellectual and social stability necessary to maintain, move, and change ideas through time.

   Scholars commonly treat an institution as an "autonomous sphere of authority" or self-contained system. (11) Thus, in food security, we may determine how each institution defines and evaluates food security in its own way. (12) As Orford notes, while human rights lawyers will treat the issue as a question of rights, trade lawyers will treat it as a matter of market access, and humanitarian actors focus on famines. The list continues: national security specialists treat food insecurity as a matter of political instability, environmentalists prioritize conservation, and refugee lawyers deal with mass migration that is the result of famine and rural impoverishment. (13)

   The politics of this proliferation of institutions becomes a contest over which institutions wins the authority and jurisdiction over global problems. (14) There are debates as to whether to imagine this proliferation as a problem of constitutional hierarchy, administrative coordination, or as a pluralist jumbled interaction of self-contained systems and values. (15) Scholars also argue over what counts as an institution and which institutions are worth studying. Nonetheless, almost any global governance perspective assumes that intergovernmental organizations are an influential (and to some, the most important) aspect of how the world is ruled. (16)

   Orford's forthcoming project investigates how food security has become a matter of global governance. She asks, "how and why it has become commonplace to think about food security as a global problem requiring international solutions by bodies that are not directly democratically accountable, so that 'how can we feed the world?' becomes an intelligible and meaningful question?" (17) Her concern is that it has become more difficult for scholars and politicians to frame food security as national issue since it is no longer popular to focus on "how a state can protect the welfare of its population." (18)

   While much of global governance scholarship focuses on all the different non-state entities which control global issues, I interpret Orford's focus on the state as still within the boundaries of a global governance perspective. Evaluating the world in terms of global governance is inherently a multi-scalar project since it provides researchers a means to study any institution that has global effect. As such, when Orford suggests that that we need to better appreciate the role of the state, this can be interpreted as a methodological argument for a global governance perspective that is more accurate.

   Today we have a better sense that states still play an important role in global governance. But we still know very little about what is their role. We cannot assume that there is a uniform understanding of state power since all states operate differently especially in varied contexts. The idea of the state itself is not a monolithic institution and is in fact made up of plural, multi-scalar normative orders. (19)

   Implied in Orford's discussion is a question as to whether the proliferation of international institutions is a good thing. Legal scholars have judged the expansive power and authority of international institutions through different notions of imperialism, constitutionalism, administrative law, and functionalism. (20) Orford measures global governance institutions against notions of democratic accountability. In that regard, she finds international institutions lacking and suggests that states have a better claim to legitimacy. (21) She implies that state-centered politics captures a wider range of interests than international institutions--it may be that state-centered politics is a more democratic debate over the global common good. Her fear is that with the proliferation of international institutions and "in the absence of conscious state planning, food production and distribution will be engineered by a narrow group of people representing a very particular set of interests." (22)

3. WHAT ORFORD'S PERSPECTIVE BRINGS TO THE DE SCHUTTER-LAMY DEBATE

   The advantage of treating food security as a matter of global governance is that, in alignment with Amartya Sen's work, problems of hunger, starvation, and famine, are not simply a technical matter of producing more food. Rather, resolving food insecurity is about determining how the political and legal system distributes food in a particular...